HOW TO!: UnScene’s Weekly Column About How to Do a Thing

HOW TO! #2: How to eat a pomegranate!

by Rich Karski

Welcome to the latest installment of Rich Karski’s HOW TO!, the weekly internet comedy column that picks up the slack for your lousy unfit parents.

In this week’s edition, we’re going to be talking fruit, and I don’t mean the kind that would cause a lesser man to make a cheap gay joke here. I am going to work under the assumption that a majority of my readership is either obese or malnourished, with very few of you falling in the middle of that spectrum. Now I don’t know if your poor diets are caused by low self-esteem or substance abuse or… yeah probably one of those two, but we’re going to get some goddamned super-foods in you to keep you alive long enough to at the very least read my next column. What is a super-food you ask? I DON’T KNOW, but that creep Dr. Oz is fucking batshit for them so I guarantee they get old ladies’ bowels running on military time, and who couldn’t use that type of regularity? So for this week, I picked the most interesting super-food I could find (some of them are literally just grass or wood) and I am going to teach you slovenly retches:

HOW TO EAT A POMEGRANATE!

STEP ONE: What The Fuck Even Is A Pomegranate?

Good question. The word “pomegranate” comes from the Latin pomum meaning “fruit” and granate meaning “countertop.” This is due to the fact that pomegranates are a fruit that can be frequently found on countertops. A pomegranate looks sort of like an apple with a weird little penis-beak growing out of it, but the main difference is everyone knows what the fuck an apple is because it was invented more than eight years ago. Pomegranates are grown probably in the jungle because I feel like if they weren’t then we all would have heard of them before now. You can tell if you are holding a pomegranate by first looking at your hands. If you notice that you are holding a fruit that makes you say “What the fuck even is this?” then congratulations friend! You’ve got yourself a pomegranate.

STEP TWO: Finding a Pomegranate

Okay so now that you know what one is, the question is where do you find it? As mentioned above, the most likely places to find pomegranates are on countertops or in grocery stores. Where in the grocery store? I would say they are most likely to be in the fruit part, with the other, normal fruits, but depending on your local supermarket’s fruit segregation policies I cannot say this for sure. Pomegranates could probably also be found on some trees, but I would imagine that traveling to a place that has these trees would give you bad diseases so you may be better off trying your luck locally. I would also not recommend putting out an ad in the newspaper seeking pomegranates because this is liable to get you put on some type of list.

STEP THREE: Selecting a Pomegranate

Once you have located one of these tricky motherfuckers you are going to need to ask yourself “Which pomegranate is right for me?” I personally opt for the ones with the weirdest, beakiest penises growing out of them, but everyone has their own system and I encourage you to try a few different ones before settling on the one that works best for your tastes. Maybe you like a fat pomegranate. Maybe you like one with a slimy film on the outside. It doesn’t really matter because this is the part that you are going to be angrily stabbing at and then throwing away. Just do not select an orange pomegranate. If someone tries to offer you one, turn it down and report them to the police. That was an orange and you will have been duped.

STEP FOUR: Transporting Your Pomegranate

You may think there’s no wrong way to get a pomegranate from point A to point B but that’s because you’re a fucking dumbshit jerkoff and not a worldly genius with his own internet column. I bet you don’t even have a letter opener that looks like a samurai sword. They don’t just give that shit away. You have to buy it at the MFA gift shop. MFA stands for Museum of Fine Arts. FINE. ARTS. Anyway, there certainly IS a wrong way to transport a pomegranate and that wrong way is on the bus. First of all, what are you, poor? Second of all, what kind of message are you sending by flaunting your fancy exotic fruit in front of the masses who probably can’t even afford bullshit fruits like bananas and pears? They would be justified in stabbing you and tying your corpse to the back of the bus to be dragged through the streets. Not that I’m advocating violence or anything… but just be safe and walk.

STEP FIVE: Preparing Your Pomegranate

Ok so you got the pomegranate home. What now? Well get yourself the biggest, meanest knife you own (I would recommend using a saw but that’s not really a knife I suppose) and roll up your sleeves because this shit is like cutting through a roll of fucking duct tape. Now that you’ve got the knife handy, you’re going to want to psych yourself up. Get mad at the pomegranate. Call the pomegranate names. You want to start this as early as possible because once you try to cut this thing it’s just going to come naturally anyhow. I would refrain from using racial slurs because this is going to get pretty intense and I don’t know how ethnically diverse your neighborhood is. I would also recommend making a pomegranate cutting playlist (Pantera’s “Cowboys From Hell” and Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” are two of my personal favorite pomegranate cutting songs.) NOW ATTACK MOTHERFUCKER! SHOW NO MERCY!

All done? Take a step back. Compose yourself. Breathe. Your kitchen is going to look like you just murdered a family of four, and maybe you did. Who’s to say what really happens when one blacks out in a fit of pomegranate-induced rage? Anyway, you should be staring at the remains of what looks like an alien skull with hundreds of little bloody thought nodules pulsating inside of it. Are they pulsating? Or has your blood pressure just risen to the point that your eyes are beating along with your heart and making these tiny sacs of brain matter dance in the light like a flickering candle? Anyway, that’s the part you eat.

STEP SIX: Eating Your Pomegranate

You’ve finally bested your opponent, and it is now time to enjoy your just reward. Wow, doesn’t really seem like that great of a payoff for all the effort. I mean, it tastes okay, but… what is this shit all over me? Motherfucker…

STEP SEVEN: Shower

You’re going to smell like a goddamned farm animal and you’re going to look like you just birthed one with your face as well. Take a goddamned shower. But don’t worry! All of those amazing super-food benefits should be kicking-in in no time at all! And you have to figure that pomegranate you just ate probably cancels out at least one of the cigarettes you had at the bar last night. So go light one up on the house. You earned it.